WOW
I had a great day today. I went to all my classes which is not normal for me. All of last year I was so uncomfortable and anxious at school I only attended my classes on critical days; when something was due or there was a test and even then I forced myself to go. It's a wonder I made honor role last year despite this fact. This year things have felt different, I'm not sure why, maybe the summer break gave me the solitude I needed to function in the college social world once again. Anyway today in my writing class, we got our first essay back. After exploring the works of Marx, Engels and Carnegie, the assignment was to construct our own solution to a pressing social problem of today. I like thinking about the bigger picture; rather then focusing on one problem and one solution, I attacked all of what I feel are worst problems of today with an all encompassing solution. The only thing that held me back was the page limit which was set at 4 pages. I tried but I absolutely couldn't keep it in 4 pages so I turned in 5. Even at 5 pages I cut it down a lot and couldn't properly introduce the credibility of my sources in text or cite research to back all the major points I made but it worked for the assignment. Its based on an idea that I have nursed for years but I never had a reason to write it until now. The title of my essay is “Humanity and the Universe; A Utopian Vision of the Future.” The teacher handed back my essay last and to my surprise, before she let go, she stood in front of me, stepped back and gave an enthusiastic “wow.” My class mates looked up as she said this and she carried on, “Michelle, your essay was amazing, its the best I've read in a long time. You really took me away” She had been sick over the weekend and her voice was really horse today. She told the class that if she had the voice she would read it out loud, instead she gave them a quick summary filled with awe and praise. Here I am, shy, quiet, and reserved, sitting there this whole time, mortified at having everyones eyes burning on me and yet absolutely absorbing the attention and praise happily. I'm not sure if my classmates hate me now for this or what but they sure stared at me a lot today. Its funny because I know I could have made that essay a lot better with more time and allowed length. Still this teacher's public enthusiastic attention gave me a glow all day. It's not the first time a teacher has done such a thing in regard to my writing but it's been a long time since I got such an elated response. I think the last time my writing was acknowledged like this was years ago when I was still at the community college. My teacher in my year long comparative religions honors sequence gave little rewards at the end of each term and all year he gave me the undefeated title of best writer in the class. Anyway my day was wonderful and I feel great. I'm currently starting a new writing assignment, its supposed to be a play which draws on the ideas from our readings of Marx, Engels, Carnegie, Nietzsche and two plays which depict the social climate of the stratified 19th century; “The Cherry Orchard” and “A Doll's House.” I'll have fun with this one.
Humanity and the Universe; A Utopian Vision of the Future
Overpopulation, disease, disability, global warming, deforestation, desertification, endangered species, poverty, oppression and war; these are some of the most pernicious problems faced by humanity. Our times are like none other in history. A look at the current state of humanity and the Earth gives us a grim picture. There is a profound undertone of global destruction, a sense that we are cutting off the branch on which we sit. One may ask which will come first, the end of humanity because of a mutual self destruction by global nuclear warfare, or by the inevitable degradation of the Earth and its resources until it can no longer sustain human life as it's progressing today.
The biggest problem for humanity in the future will literally be avoiding extinction. So what can we do to ensure our own existence? There are things we are already doing or should be doing; recycling, using renewable energy resources, conserving nonrenewable energy resources and minimizing our impact on the environment by controlling pollution, protecting endangered species, and halting clear cutting. Socially, we should promote peace to avoid war, terrorism and nuclear destruction. Politically, we should structure governments in ways which enrich citizens by fighting poverty, oppression and disease. Personally, we should take measures to control population growth by ethically deciding to reproduce in replacement numbers only. These are not new concepts, they are common knowledge. While important, these things are merely ways to postpone the inevitable.
Every biological population follows a growth curve. Humanity happens to follow the reckless exponential growth curve. There are over 6 billion people on earth today. Wikipedia projects that by 2050 the population will have grown to nearly 9 billion people. Estimates from many other sources are much higher. In their article, “Population, Sustainability, and Earth's Carrying Capacity,” Gretchen C. Daily and Paul R. Ehrlich show our current rate of population growth is, “being maintained only through the exhaustion and dispersion of a one-time inheritance of natural capital (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990), including topsoil, groundwater, and biodiversity. The rapid depletion of these essential resources, coupled with a worldwide degradation of land (Jacobs 1991, Myers 1984, Postel 1989) and atmospheric quality (Jones and Wigley 1989, Schneider 1990), indicate that the human enterprise has not only exceeded its current social carrying capacity, but it is actually reducing future potential biophysical carrying capacities by depleting essential natural capital stocks” (Daily and Ehrlich). Eventually, the earth will not be able to sustain our population. Instead of postponing the inevitable, we should be avoiding it all together. This will require a clear plan to utilize current and anticipated knowledge, science and technology to completely change the present course of humanity and its impact on the earth.
Some day we must depart from our beloved planet, to save both it and ourselves. To do this, we need to build a space elevator. This engineering feat will enable us to stretch our arms just outside the Earth's atmosphere. With a space elevator we will finally be able to efficiently transport vehicles, goods and people into space without wasting precious fuel as we do now with rockets. According to a NASA report called, “Space Elevators, and Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millennium,” compiled by D.V. Smitherman, Jr., “the Earth to GEO space elevator is not feasible today, but could be an important concept for the future development of space in the latter part of the 21st century. It has the potential to provide mass transportation to space in the same way highways, railroads, power lines, and pipelines provide mass transportation across the Earth’s surface” (9). In the astronomical community the space elevator is the next major paradigm for transportation and communication. Smitherman goes on to report that, “Given proper planning for the development of critical technologies, it appears that space elevator construction could become feasible” (10). If we achieve one space elevator we will most likely make more of them. The materials for building orbiting artificial habitats can be transported outside Earth's atmosphere by way of the space elevator and assembled in space.
The first people to actually live in these artificial habitats will be the workers who construct them, and the elite. Orbiting mansions will hang like satellites above the earth. The rich will most certainly be interested in this novel floating real estate. Artificial space habitats will come in several forms, orbiting the earth or other planets like satellites, mobile like space ships and stationary bio-domes on planets such as mars. As this new way of life progresses, we should move as many people off the earth as possible. Some people will probably have to stay on the ground in order to farm and mine the earth to produce the resources needed in space. Hopefully, as we continue to advance robotic technology, only robots will have to do the earth work. At first everything we need to survive in space will have to come from the earth. Necessities such as, oxygen, water, food, fuel, and building materials will all have to travel up the space elevator to the people living in space. We can easily take advantage of solar power in space and there is some evidence that we may be able to mine resources from our moon and other planetary bodies. At this point, the earth will essentially become a farm planet, allowed to return largely to its natural state, while we use the minimum amount of land and resources to propel our species into the realm of space colonization and travel.
Most excitingly, sooner then we once thought, we may be able to discover and inhabit other Earth-like planets. In his article called, “Earth-Like Planets May Be Common in Known Planetary Systems,” Sean Raymond wrote, “more than one-third of the giant planet systems recently detected outside our solar system may harbor Earth-like planets covered in deep global oceans that offer abundant potential for life, according to a new study by two scientists from Penn State and one from the University of Colorado associated with NASA's Astrobiology Institute” (Raymond, 2006).
As the population continues to grow exponentially while we colonize our own solar system, we will build vast networks which expand further and further into space. Eventually these networks, if they continue to grow uninhibited, will expand into these new solar systems. One problem with space travel has always been the enormous distances which must be crossed and the amount of time it takes to travel these distances. With a network, generations can live their lives in space, building on the habitats of the past, expanding slowly but constantly. Beyond this, cyborgs, and artificially intelligent robots (AI), unattached to the traditional biological human lifespan can travel further for longer then the rest of humanity.
Technology in cybernetics is growing. The first cyborgs are already those with disabilities and diseases. If we did not have the ethical interest in saving the lives of people with ailments of all kinds then we would have no practical motivation to develop cybernetics. Science has already developed artificial hearts and robotic limbs among other amazing technologies for those in need of them. In the future, when this technology is more developed, regular healthy people may opt for partial or full synthetic bodies to prolong their lives and increase their physical abilities.
In an article by Steven J. Dick, called, “THEY Aren't Who You Think,” he explores the possibilities of AI taking on a major role for humanity, exploring the universe in ways our biological bodies can not. Dick quotes a book called Mind Children, by Hans Moravec, “a pioneer in AI and robotics at Carnegie-Mellon” (24). Dick writes, “Within the next century, he predicted, our machines 'will mature into entities as complex as ourselves, and eventually into something transcending everything we know--in whom we can take pride when they refer to themselves as our descendants. Unleashed from the plodding pace of biological evolution, the children of our minds will be free to grow to confront immense and fundamental challenges in the larger universe" (24). Technology will change the course of human evolution and its relationship to the biological world.
Right now we confront the most devastating problems in human history. However, these very problems push us to develop the technology needed, to achieve the proposed goals of space colonization and travel. For instance, overpopulation will no longer be a problem if our goal is to colonize space. Technology grows exponentially alongside population, the faster our population grows, the faster our technology grows. As I stated earlier, we also need the problems of disability and disease to drive the science of cybernetics. There is no need to weed out anyone from the gene pool as past movements like eugenics have promoted, population control actually harms us in that it slows us down technologically.
Moving the focus of civilization into space will change the state of Earth's environment for the better, allowing it to revive nature and thrive. We could stop deforestation and desertification by allowing the forests and animals to reclaim the land. We could systematically disassemble our existing cities, importing the usable materials to space by way of our magnificent elevator. This would make the land available for natural existence once again. This would benefit endangered species, among other things. Additionally, global warming is a direct result of our use of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases. If we move off the planet, we will reduce emissions of these gases into the Earth's atmosphere.
As for poverty, oppression and war, hopefully moving into space will help dampen these. First it will take international cooperation to move the people off the land and into space. Second, once in space, there are no continents dividing us, no countries to conquer or territories and holy lands to feud over; just infinite space to inhabit. The space civilization economy is best left to another paper, but let's assume, based on the ample free solar energy in our galaxy, for example, that by its practical nature, it will take care of the poor better than the land based system.
I have heard it proposed that a mutual threat to the world could unite us against a common evil. I propose that in a mass exodus to space, we unite for the common good, to ensure lasting human existence and to preserve our precious planet Earth. Space colonization will mark a new age of human existence and experience. Imagine looking out your window at the earth as a pristine orb of natural wilderness where you can go to visit and vacation. The earth is our life line on which our very survival depends so it's in our best interest to preserve it. If we are not living primarily on the planet, we will not be contributing to its demise and we will be expanding humanity in amazing new ways.
Copyright Michelle Craig 2006
Works Cited
Daily, Gretchen C. and Ehrlich, Paul R. “Population, Sustainability, and Earth's Carrying Capacity” Bioscience; Nov 1992, Vol. 42 Issue 10, p761, 11p. http://proxy.lib.pdx.edu:3161/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9302143395&site=ehost- live
Dick, Steven J. “THEY Aren't Who You Think” Mercury; Nov/Dec 2003, Vol. 32 Issue 6, p18-26, 9p. http://proxy.lib.pdx.edu:3161/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=11285645&site=ehost-live
Raymond, Sean. “Earth-Like Planets May Be Common in Known Planetary Systems” Eberly College of Science News. Pennsylvania State University; 2006. http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Sigurdsson9-2006.htm
Smitherman, D.V. Jr. “Space Elevators, and Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millennium.” United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville. Aug. 2000
"World Population." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 8 Oct 2006. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 9 Oct 2006 .
Humanity and the Universe; A Utopian Vision of the Future
Overpopulation, disease, disability, global warming, deforestation, desertification, endangered species, poverty, oppression and war; these are some of the most pernicious problems faced by humanity. Our times are like none other in history. A look at the current state of humanity and the Earth gives us a grim picture. There is a profound undertone of global destruction, a sense that we are cutting off the branch on which we sit. One may ask which will come first, the end of humanity because of a mutual self destruction by global nuclear warfare, or by the inevitable degradation of the Earth and its resources until it can no longer sustain human life as it's progressing today.
The biggest problem for humanity in the future will literally be avoiding extinction. So what can we do to ensure our own existence? There are things we are already doing or should be doing; recycling, using renewable energy resources, conserving nonrenewable energy resources and minimizing our impact on the environment by controlling pollution, protecting endangered species, and halting clear cutting. Socially, we should promote peace to avoid war, terrorism and nuclear destruction. Politically, we should structure governments in ways which enrich citizens by fighting poverty, oppression and disease. Personally, we should take measures to control population growth by ethically deciding to reproduce in replacement numbers only. These are not new concepts, they are common knowledge. While important, these things are merely ways to postpone the inevitable.
Every biological population follows a growth curve. Humanity happens to follow the reckless exponential growth curve. There are over 6 billion people on earth today. Wikipedia projects that by 2050 the population will have grown to nearly 9 billion people. Estimates from many other sources are much higher. In their article, “Population, Sustainability, and Earth's Carrying Capacity,” Gretchen C. Daily and Paul R. Ehrlich show our current rate of population growth is, “being maintained only through the exhaustion and dispersion of a one-time inheritance of natural capital (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990), including topsoil, groundwater, and biodiversity. The rapid depletion of these essential resources, coupled with a worldwide degradation of land (Jacobs 1991, Myers 1984, Postel 1989) and atmospheric quality (Jones and Wigley 1989, Schneider 1990), indicate that the human enterprise has not only exceeded its current social carrying capacity, but it is actually reducing future potential biophysical carrying capacities by depleting essential natural capital stocks” (Daily and Ehrlich). Eventually, the earth will not be able to sustain our population. Instead of postponing the inevitable, we should be avoiding it all together. This will require a clear plan to utilize current and anticipated knowledge, science and technology to completely change the present course of humanity and its impact on the earth.
Some day we must depart from our beloved planet, to save both it and ourselves. To do this, we need to build a space elevator. This engineering feat will enable us to stretch our arms just outside the Earth's atmosphere. With a space elevator we will finally be able to efficiently transport vehicles, goods and people into space without wasting precious fuel as we do now with rockets. According to a NASA report called, “Space Elevators, and Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millennium,” compiled by D.V. Smitherman, Jr., “the Earth to GEO space elevator is not feasible today, but could be an important concept for the future development of space in the latter part of the 21st century. It has the potential to provide mass transportation to space in the same way highways, railroads, power lines, and pipelines provide mass transportation across the Earth’s surface” (9). In the astronomical community the space elevator is the next major paradigm for transportation and communication. Smitherman goes on to report that, “Given proper planning for the development of critical technologies, it appears that space elevator construction could become feasible” (10). If we achieve one space elevator we will most likely make more of them. The materials for building orbiting artificial habitats can be transported outside Earth's atmosphere by way of the space elevator and assembled in space.
The first people to actually live in these artificial habitats will be the workers who construct them, and the elite. Orbiting mansions will hang like satellites above the earth. The rich will most certainly be interested in this novel floating real estate. Artificial space habitats will come in several forms, orbiting the earth or other planets like satellites, mobile like space ships and stationary bio-domes on planets such as mars. As this new way of life progresses, we should move as many people off the earth as possible. Some people will probably have to stay on the ground in order to farm and mine the earth to produce the resources needed in space. Hopefully, as we continue to advance robotic technology, only robots will have to do the earth work. At first everything we need to survive in space will have to come from the earth. Necessities such as, oxygen, water, food, fuel, and building materials will all have to travel up the space elevator to the people living in space. We can easily take advantage of solar power in space and there is some evidence that we may be able to mine resources from our moon and other planetary bodies. At this point, the earth will essentially become a farm planet, allowed to return largely to its natural state, while we use the minimum amount of land and resources to propel our species into the realm of space colonization and travel.
Most excitingly, sooner then we once thought, we may be able to discover and inhabit other Earth-like planets. In his article called, “Earth-Like Planets May Be Common in Known Planetary Systems,” Sean Raymond wrote, “more than one-third of the giant planet systems recently detected outside our solar system may harbor Earth-like planets covered in deep global oceans that offer abundant potential for life, according to a new study by two scientists from Penn State and one from the University of Colorado associated with NASA's Astrobiology Institute” (Raymond, 2006).
As the population continues to grow exponentially while we colonize our own solar system, we will build vast networks which expand further and further into space. Eventually these networks, if they continue to grow uninhibited, will expand into these new solar systems. One problem with space travel has always been the enormous distances which must be crossed and the amount of time it takes to travel these distances. With a network, generations can live their lives in space, building on the habitats of the past, expanding slowly but constantly. Beyond this, cyborgs, and artificially intelligent robots (AI), unattached to the traditional biological human lifespan can travel further for longer then the rest of humanity.
Technology in cybernetics is growing. The first cyborgs are already those with disabilities and diseases. If we did not have the ethical interest in saving the lives of people with ailments of all kinds then we would have no practical motivation to develop cybernetics. Science has already developed artificial hearts and robotic limbs among other amazing technologies for those in need of them. In the future, when this technology is more developed, regular healthy people may opt for partial or full synthetic bodies to prolong their lives and increase their physical abilities.
In an article by Steven J. Dick, called, “THEY Aren't Who You Think,” he explores the possibilities of AI taking on a major role for humanity, exploring the universe in ways our biological bodies can not. Dick quotes a book called Mind Children, by Hans Moravec, “a pioneer in AI and robotics at Carnegie-Mellon” (24). Dick writes, “Within the next century, he predicted, our machines 'will mature into entities as complex as ourselves, and eventually into something transcending everything we know--in whom we can take pride when they refer to themselves as our descendants. Unleashed from the plodding pace of biological evolution, the children of our minds will be free to grow to confront immense and fundamental challenges in the larger universe" (24). Technology will change the course of human evolution and its relationship to the biological world.
Right now we confront the most devastating problems in human history. However, these very problems push us to develop the technology needed, to achieve the proposed goals of space colonization and travel. For instance, overpopulation will no longer be a problem if our goal is to colonize space. Technology grows exponentially alongside population, the faster our population grows, the faster our technology grows. As I stated earlier, we also need the problems of disability and disease to drive the science of cybernetics. There is no need to weed out anyone from the gene pool as past movements like eugenics have promoted, population control actually harms us in that it slows us down technologically.
Moving the focus of civilization into space will change the state of Earth's environment for the better, allowing it to revive nature and thrive. We could stop deforestation and desertification by allowing the forests and animals to reclaim the land. We could systematically disassemble our existing cities, importing the usable materials to space by way of our magnificent elevator. This would make the land available for natural existence once again. This would benefit endangered species, among other things. Additionally, global warming is a direct result of our use of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases. If we move off the planet, we will reduce emissions of these gases into the Earth's atmosphere.
As for poverty, oppression and war, hopefully moving into space will help dampen these. First it will take international cooperation to move the people off the land and into space. Second, once in space, there are no continents dividing us, no countries to conquer or territories and holy lands to feud over; just infinite space to inhabit. The space civilization economy is best left to another paper, but let's assume, based on the ample free solar energy in our galaxy, for example, that by its practical nature, it will take care of the poor better than the land based system.
I have heard it proposed that a mutual threat to the world could unite us against a common evil. I propose that in a mass exodus to space, we unite for the common good, to ensure lasting human existence and to preserve our precious planet Earth. Space colonization will mark a new age of human existence and experience. Imagine looking out your window at the earth as a pristine orb of natural wilderness where you can go to visit and vacation. The earth is our life line on which our very survival depends so it's in our best interest to preserve it. If we are not living primarily on the planet, we will not be contributing to its demise and we will be expanding humanity in amazing new ways.
Copyright Michelle Craig 2006
Works Cited
Daily, Gretchen C. and Ehrlich, Paul R. “Population, Sustainability, and Earth's Carrying Capacity” Bioscience; Nov 1992, Vol. 42 Issue 10, p761, 11p. http://proxy.lib.pdx.edu:3161/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9302143395&site=ehost- live
Dick, Steven J. “THEY Aren't Who You Think” Mercury; Nov/Dec 2003, Vol. 32 Issue 6, p18-26, 9p. http://proxy.lib.pdx.edu:3161/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=11285645&site=ehost-live
Raymond, Sean. “Earth-Like Planets May Be Common in Known Planetary Systems” Eberly College of Science News. Pennsylvania State University; 2006. http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Sigurdsson9-2006.htm
Smitherman, D.V. Jr. “Space Elevators, and Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millennium.” United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville. Aug. 2000
"World Population." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 8 Oct 2006. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 9 Oct 2006 .